


The Blood We Carry

by Sororising



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Guilt, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, This is nicer than it sounds in the tags, hopefully, mention of suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-02 23:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8688136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising
Summary: “And there’s the difference between us, Wanda,” Natasha says, her voice soft as silk, hard as steel. “You were broken. I was made.”“You’re like a cobweb,” Wanda says, because she’s just had this thought and she wants to try to explain it before it drifts away.Natasha just blinks at her. “I’m like a - what? Because I’m the Black Widow?”Wanda shakes her head, sits up straighter. She wants - needs - to explain this; she has no idea why, she tries not to question the way her brain works too much, for fear it will only get worse. “No, no. Spidersilk. It looks so fragile. People think they could break it with - with one touch. But in reality, it’s stronger than steel.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LieutenantSaavik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/gifts).



> For ElleDritch, because without [this meta](http://gaygent-romanoff.tumblr.com/post/152289705953/why-scarletwidow-would-make-sense) that you wrote this would never have existed. Thank you so much for being such a wonderful friend.
> 
> This is set right after the battle in Lagos, as a kind of wishful interlude that might have happened. This fic is (to a certain extent) deliberately a little weird and disjointed, to reflect Wanda's POV. Hopefully it isn't difficult to follow though; if it is feedback is very welcome so I can tweak bits! Wanda's powers are kind of terrifying, when you think about them, and very complex, and I imagine scary and confusing to possess sometimes. I wanted to explore how they might impact on her thoughts and mindset.
> 
> Title is inspired by 'The Things They Carried,' by Tim O'Brien, which I highly recommend (set during the Vietnam War with all that entails, though, so be prepared).

“Wanda,” she hears, and the voice sounds so far away.

She doesn’t have to let it pull her back. Back to reality, which has been so painful for her for so long now.

“Wanda,” Natasha says again, walking further into the room. “Please. We need you right now. I know it’s hard. Believe me, I understand.”

How can anyone understand this?

“I felt them die,” she whispers, and it’s a confession that sets her free, even as it feels like the final turn of the key to her cage. “Every one of them. I felt them leave the earth.”

She had felt each mind crying out, each scream as though it came from her own chest, twining together in one desperate cry for mercy - mercy from her. Each life a thread, weaving themselves together in tapestries of love and loss and _life,_ until one motion from her hands had snapped them all in two.

Every one. She had felt every one. 

And she’s glad she did. Glad that she can still feel the echoes of their loss inside her. Someone should bear witness, should carry the knowledge of their last moments, and who better to shoulder that burden than the one who ended their lives?

She looks down, at where her hands are twisting together in her lap, and sees red light glowing from her palms. Some days she can control it, others - well. She guesses she’ll be having the other kinds of days for a while.

She clasps her hands together, but it shines through her skin.

“Lady Macbeth,” she says, very quietly.

“What?”

Oh. She hadn’t forgotten Natasha was there, of course she hadn’t; her mind is always aware when she’s not alone in a room.

But - sometimes her mind knowing something is different from _her_ knowing it, which she doesn’t know how she can even begin to explain.

It’s usually best not to try, she’s found. People can think what they want to about her. 

“Hello,” she says to Natasha, who’s frowning at her.

“Why were you talking about Shakespeare?”

Oh. Of course.

She holds up her hands, so that the red light spills from them freely.

“Can’t wash it off,” she says, and she’s startled to hear a laugh come out of her mouth. 

Nothing about this is amusing, she tells her brain, but she can hear it laughing at her still, echoing in the dark corners where she never looks too closely. Where she’s afraid to look at all, most days.

“I think you’re going into shock,” Natasha says, and the way she’s looking at Wanda is the way someone might look at a frightened animal, at a lost child, not at a -

A weapon.

“No,” she says, because she knows _shock_ doesn’t describe what her mind is doing right now.

She feels connected to every life within her reach. Especially in battle. She’s so aware of how easy it would be for her to slip inside someone’s mind, plant visions that change the course of their actions, twist them and bend them until they’re _hers._

Sometimes she feels like the spider in the middle of a vast web, spinning hundreds of strands that link her to innocents, able to break those threads - those people - without warning or reason.

It is too much power for one person, this curse-gift. She has that thought many times a day, and each time it scares her, and each time she is fiercely grateful for it.

The day she no longer believes that is the day she should cease to exist. She could cause so much destruction - so much more than she already has. She dreams of what she could do, some nights, dreams that paint the inside of her eyelids red.

Other nights, she wakes with no memory of what she’d dreamed. She isn’t sure which is more painful.

Natasha sighs, and sits down next to her. Wanda clasps her hands together again.

“I’m sorry,” she offers, and it falls heavy into the silence. An image flashes into her mind, of a stone thrown to crack ice. It doesn’t feel like a memory, but she thinks it might be one.

“I told Loki something once,” Natasha says, almost too quiet to be heard. “About having red in my ledger. Wanting to wipe it out.” She pauses, and from the corner of her eye Wanda sees an odd smile playing at the corners of her mouth. It isn’t a happy smile. “It was a lie.”

“It seems like a good goal to me,” Wanda says cautiously, not sure where the conversation is going.

Natasha glances sideways at her. “Alright, maybe not a lie. A gross oversimplification, then. I did believe in it once, a long time ago. When Clint first - recruited me,” she says, and Wanda’s certain that _recruited_ hadn’t been her first choice of words.

“What changed?” she asks, not quite sure if she wants to know the answer.

Natasha’s almost-smile returns. “I did.” And Wanda realises she had known that answer already, whether from her memories of Natasha’s memories, real or false, or from observing her over the past few months, or both, or neither.

“You can’t wipe the slate clean,” Natasha continues, still quiet, still with something hidden in her face that Wanda can’t read. “There is no amount of good deeds that can erase the past. That’s not how it works.”

Wanda swallows down her questions, sensing that there’s more to be spoken still.

“There is no atonement, for the things I’ve done,” Natasha says, her eyes fixed on nothing, or on something only she can see, something that haunts her from years and miles away.

“That sounds like a sad way to live,” Wanda says cautiously.

Natasha looks at her, in that sharp way she has that makes Wanda wonder what it would be like to meet another mindreader. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she says, sounding frustrated with herself. “I - it’s hard to explain.”

“You don’t have to.” _You don’t owe me anything,_ she wants to say, but the words don’t make it past her lips. 

“I know I don’t,” Natasha says. “But - let me try.”

It isn’t a question. Wanda nods, and tries to clear her throat. “Of course.”

“It isn’t a debt to be paid,” Natasha says. “It isn’t a ledger, to be balanced and redrawn. Say I’ve killed a hundred people.” The matter-of-fact way she says that makes Wanda suspect that the real number is much higher. And likely unknown. “And then I save a hundred lives, later in life. Those new lives don’t cancel out the death. There's no - no barter system, not for something like that. I could save a thousand, or a million. It wouldn’t make the first hundred alive again.”

Wanda tries not to react too obviously to that. She had wondered - of course she had wondered - about magic to bring back the dead. Her powers aren’t limitless, but she doesn’t _know_ their limits. She had thought, maybe, that she could - no, but Pietro would never have thanked her for it, even if it had somehow been possible.

“Why do you keep doing good, then?” she asks, because it’s the only thing she _can_ ask, after hearing that.

“Because I can,” Natasha says, and it’s - so simple, and yet the furthest thing from simple she could ever imagine. 

“I want to be like that.”

“You are, Wanda.” 

“I could make anyone do whatever I wanted,” Wanda says, desperate to make Natasha understand how dangerous she is. And how much worse she could be, under the right circumstances.

Natasha looks at her, and keeps looking in silence, until Wanda turns to meet her eyes. 

“So could I.”

That startles Wanda into silence.

“Oh, I don’t have your magic,” Natasha says, with a twist to her mouth that makes her look both resigned and angry at the same time. “But isn’t that worse, in a way? I could manipulate people even without those powers. Make them do anything I wanted them to, and make them believe it was all their idea in the first place.”

There’s still one difference between them, though, and Wanda doesn’t know if she can bring herself to speak it aloud.

“But I volunteered,” she says, and the truth is so heavy as it leaves her, and yet she feels no lighter when she hears it echo into the air.

“No, you didn’t.”

Wanda stares at Natasha. “I _did.”_

_You can’t take this away from me. I am responsible for my own choices. I have to be. I am scared of what I will become, if you take this away._

“It wasn’t a true choice,” Natasha says, and she states it as though it’s fact. “Hydra were manipulating eighty percent of your country by that point. Trust me, I would know. You had no idea what you were signing up for.”

Wanda shakes her head. “I still made that choice.”

Natasha shrugs. “It’s up to you how you think of it.”

Wanda tries to think of something, anything else that they can talk about. Some things are still too painful to examine closely.

“Do you have any memories of your family?” Wanda asks. She thinks she knows the answer, from the brief glimpses she remembers from Natasha’s mind, but it seems wrong, somehow, to think about those. She would rather hear the answer freely spoken.

Natasha shakes her head. “I was very young, when they -”

She pauses. “I was very young,” she ends softly.

“I think I remember my parents,” Wanda says, lost in her thoughts - it’s easy for her to get lost there, now, too easy. Sometimes it is very hard to find her way back. “We were ten, you know. I must have had so many memories of them already. But - sometimes they don’t feel quite real, in my mind. Like I’m remembering a dream.”

“Trust them,” Natasha says, with a sudden fierceness that should startle Wanda. It doesn’t. “Don’t second-guess yourself. You’d know if the memories had been implanted, better than anyone. Don’t - don’t take that away from yourself.”

Wanda looks at Natasha. “I will,” she says, and she thinks she even means it. “Just - sometimes I don’t know if I’ll ever understand how my thoughts work. But I’ll trust them. I had my family. I will remember them.”

She isn’t trying to hurt Natasha, who has no memory of her past, who has only what she hopes it was to give her the faintest kind of comfort.

Of course, just because you don’t _want_ to hurt someone, doesn’t mean you don’t end up doing it anyway. 

She knows that better than anyone. The battle in Lagos is still playing in her mind. She wonders when - if - it will stop, and if she even wants it to.

The red light glows brighter for a heartbeat.

“And there’s the difference between us, Wanda,” Natasha says, her voice soft as silk, hard as steel. “You were broken. I was made.”

“You’re like a cobweb,” Wanda says, because she’s just had this thought and she wants to try to explain it before it drifts away.

Natasha just blinks at her. “I’m like a - what? Because I’m the Black Widow?”

Wanda shakes her head, sits up straighter. She wants - needs - to explain this; she has no idea why, she tries not to question the way her brain works too much, for fear it will only get worse. “No, no. Spidersilk. It looks so fragile. People think they could break it with - with one touch. But in reality, it’s stronger than steel.”

She holds her breath. She could have explained it so much better in Sokovian, she thinks.

“That’s not exactly the point I was making,” Natasha says, and the wariness in her voice makes Wanda’s chest ache.

She can’t explain it, the way her thoughts work these days, the way they dart from connection to connection, sometimes following eight different tracks at once, leaping together and combining in ways that barely feel coherent, even to her. 

“I’m sorry,” she says helplessly. “I’m not making any sense.” She looks down at her hands. _Out, damned spot._ She’s been reading a lot, the past two years. Trying to keep her mind occupied, both for her sake and for everyone else’s.

Macbeth had been a recommendation from Vision, though she doesn’t know if xe ever actually read it or if xe’d just downloaded the script from the internet into xir consciousness. She doesn’t know if there’s a difference, really. 

The light dances in her vision, taunting her. 

She closes her eyes, and it shines through her eyelids. Where has she gone, the girl who laughed for joy, instead of to drive away the darkness that hovers over her mind? The girl who teased her friends rather than scared them, the girl who played pranks on her brother, who -

No, no.

Don’t think about Pietro. Not now. Please.

“I like it,” Natasha says abruptly. “Maybe Cobweb should be my new codename.”

Wanda recognises that it’s a joke, one she’s included in, and feels something inside her relax. Somewhat.

“I truly am sorry,” she says, and she doesn’t flinch away from the piercing look Natasha fixes her with. “I would undo it all, if I could.”

“You have nothing to apologise for. You were protecting people,” Natasha says, and Wanda prays she isn’t imagining the certainty in the words.

“You were trying to save lives, not take them.” This time Wanda doesn’t need to pray. She can hear the truth in Natasha’s voice, implacable.

She blinks quickly, hoping that the tears will stay hidden. “Thank you.”

“Not many would come to the Widow for absolution,” Natasha says, wry and - and something else, something darker that Wanda doesn’t want to examine too closely; she’s constantly terrified that she’ll become so close to someone that she slips inside their mind without meaning to, invading them in a way she would never forgive herself for.

That’s one of the reasons she prefers to spend time with Vision, rather than any of the other Avengers. Xir mind is so alien, even to her powers. She doesn’t think she could inhabit it even if she tried. She can relax around xem. 

She’s especially afraid of falling into Natasha’s head, after what she’d done there last time.

Not because of what she would see, though that does make her cautious; she has enough horrors in her own thoughts; she’d rather not add other people’s to her nightmares. 

But because of what she knows it would do to Natasha, who guards her privacy in the way that only someone who has known violation can.

She wants to earn Natasha’s trust, and she knows without needing to be told that it’s no easy prize.

It isn’t that Natasha wouldn’t forgive her for the intrusion, if it did happen. It’s that she isn’t sure she’d be able to forgive herself.

 _You were trying to save lives, not take them,_ she hears again, and this time she hears the words that had gone unspoken, the dischordant counterpoint that had hovered under the surface.

Natasha might as well have said _unlike me._

“Oh.”

Natasha looks at her, sharply. “What is it?” Maybe she thinks Wanda’s sensed something, some new danger.

“I - it wasn’t your fault either,” Wanda says, hating the way Natasha’s face closes off immediately. She isn’t going to take the words back. You can’t unsay a truth, just like you can’t undo a death, no matter the pain it causes.

“I’ve made my peace with who I am, Wanda.”

Wanda shakes her head. “Maybe you have. But that doesn’t mean you know it wasn’t your fault.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow. “We could go round in circles for a long time, you realise? If we keep talking about needless guilt.”

“It isn’t _needless,”_ Wanda says, knowing that Natasha will sense the unvoiced thoughts.

_It keeps me from harming other more than I already have. I owe it to the people I have hurt. I owe them remembrance._

“We all have our burdens,” Natasha says quietly. “We all have blood on our hands. Even people like Steve and Sam. You don’t have to carry this alone.”

Alone.

She’s been so alone, since Pietro - 

Since he -

She’s been so alone.

Even with her new team. She cares for them all, she does. They are the reason she’s still here. If Clint hadn’t spoken to her, if she hadn’t decided to fight, she doesn’t know what she would have done - and she can’t tell him that, because she knows he’d see through her, through to the most literal interpretation of those words. He’s the reason she’s still alive, in a way, because if she hadn’t destroyed Ultron she doesn’t know if she could have found the strength to do anything other than turn her power against herself -

She shakes herself. This isn’t the time to dwell on those thoughts. Not after what just happened. 

Vision is the first true friend she’s made in a long time. They’re both outsiders - well, almost the whole team are outsiders, in one way or another. But the others had already established the ways they could work together, the boundaries and the limits, the moments they could laugh at each other and the times they needed to take a step back.

The things you can only learn with time. She and Vision had been the newest members, and in a way the youngest, though she doesn’t think age really works in the same way - or at all - with an entity like Vision.

So the two of them had become friends, of a sort. She’s glad to have xem in her life. And xe’s nothing at all like Pietro, which she admits helps with their friendship.

And then there’s Natasha.

She’d been wary of her, at first. Of their differences, and even more of their odd similarities.

And now -

“Thank you,” she says, taking the words as the gift she knows them to be. Accepting them, because their denial would be rejection, and she isn’t that cruel.

She could be, if she wanted to be. There isn’t much she couldn’t be, couldn’t do, if she let her powers have the control they want.

But she has true choices, now.

She looks at Natasha, at the woman who can still strike fear into the hearts of hardened soldiers. She remembers the things she’s read and heard about the legendary Black Widow, manipulator of thousands, spy and fugitive and assassin. And she thinks about the way Natasha teases Steve and Sam, about the small smile that had stayed on her face for hours after Clint had shown her a little video on his phone, his children grinning and waving, shouting ‘hi, aunt Nat!’ too close to the camera.

She thinks of the dissonance there, of the contrast between past and present, between what was and is and could be. 

If Natasha can live this new life, can work to help others and to protect the world without the motivation of redemption, then maybe she can do the same.

All she knows is that she wants to try. She wants to wake up every day, and she wants to make that choice anew, because that’s the only way she will ever trust herself.

She cannot run from what she is. From who she is. 

And she shouldn’t try.

“Thank you,” she says again. The light still shines, but she no longer keeps her eyes closed against it.

**Author's Note:**

> Natasha and Wanda's thoughts on redemption etc are what I felt could work for the characters in this particular situation, they aren't meant as anything objective.
> 
> This was a challenge to write but a really enjoyable one. Feedback and concrit are very welcome and appreciated!


End file.
